Paid Social Media Made Easy, Part 2: Twitter

After Facebook, Twitter is the second most used social media site by marketers. With over 284 million monthly active users, they offer a wide variety of audiences with varying interests. Advertising on twitter has the potential of a nice return on your investment. In order to be successful, you first need to understand what options are available and how they can make a difference in your efforts.

Targeting:

Almost everything you can do can be targeted to specific followers, tailored audiences, keywords, interests, locations, languages, gender, and even devices.

Pricing:

So how exactly are Twitter ads bought? You are in control of your budget and can cap spend on a daily basis. Ads are bought on a bidding system based on competition but you set the max price you’re willing to shell out. The beauty of Twitter is that you are only paying for performance. Simply put, you’ll only be charged when a user takes an action based on your campaign objectives. For example, if your goal is to build followers, you will only pay for each follow you receive as a result of the campaign. If your goal is to garner leads, you will only pay for each lead captured with in the ad. Get it?

Types of Units:

Promoted Trends

Promoted Trends are a nice complement to your brand awareness efforts. This type of unit shows up on the homepage at the top of the left-hand Trends column along with other trends that are relevant to specific audiences. They are posted for 24 hours and always include promoted by text underneath. These units are great because they are not easily missed. It’s almost like a mini-roadblock unit that only goes to a very specific audience.

Promoted Trends are valuable because they can boost conversations about your business, even after they aren’t running. According to a study done by Twitter back in 2013, in the 14 days following Promoted Trend exposure, Twitter users produced 22% more conversations about an advertiser compared to the two weeks before they were exposed. The same study suggested that users were 151% more likely to tweet about purchase consideration following exposure.

Promoted Accounts

Promoted accounts show up in the “Who to follow” section on the homepage, in the homepage feed, within the people search results page, and even on profile pages. Building your followers is valuable for sharing future content and promotions. The reason why this type of ad is so valuable is because according to Twitter, 70% of followers will retweet your content (read: free advertising!) and 43% will make a purchase down the road. It is important to find the right kind of followers by using the right kind of targeting. The number of followers has no relevance if they don’t care about your business.

To get started, write some Tweetable text that explains why someone should follow your account and don’t forget to include a call to action. Target users who are likely to be interested in your business, which will result in a higher follower count. A good starting point is reaching out to users who follow influencers in your industry, are interested in sectors related to your business, or even follow your competitors as we discussed in the last blog post.

As you’re running this campaign, don’t forget to constantly push out exciting new content to your followers. Make sure you give them something worth a retweet!

Promoted Tweets

Promoted Tweets appear in your target audience’s homepage timeline. Start with either announcing an upcoming product release, a sale, an event, or other relevant content. Images and/or videos tend to drive higher user engagement. Before you pay, test the content out on your current followers. If you receive a lot of engagement, you’ve got the green light to start paying for it as a promotion. After selecting the perfect promoted tweet, use Twitter’s targeting options to connect with the right audience.

There are a few different types of advertising tools that can enhance your promoted tweets. These tools are called cards and are used to help meet your specific objectives.

Website Cards- Help drive traffic and can include conversion tracking to track purchases or behaviors. These are purchased on a Cost-Per-Click basis.

App Install Cards- Keep in mind that over 75% of Twitter users access the platform via mobile. This makes it a great channel to drive installs. These are purchased on a Cost-Per-Click basis. Here’s how the card works.

Lead Cards- These are used to capture email addresses of users in your target audience and are purchased on a Cost-Per-Lead basis.

The last piece of information that I’ll leave you with is to always track your performance and optimize accordingly. If you’re not getting the results you want, tweak your creative or targeting until you do.

Catch up with us next week for our last two posts of this series on Instagram and Youtube.